In our increasingly polarized public discourse, creeping emotionalism is distorting the definition of important words. Call me old fashioned, but I like my words with their conventional meanings hanging neatly in their respective closets so we can find them when needed.

Local commentators here in Durham have called Mohammad Reza Teheri-azar’s recent drive into a crowd of students at UNC’s Pit a terrorist act. Well, no! He was a disturbed, young adult driving under the influence of parts of the Quran that fed his particular illness. He is no different from the loonies at Columbine or the mindlessly gullible followers of Charles Manson. He was sent not by Al Quaida, but by the crazed, misfiring neurons in his brain, acting on that most infantile of emotions, revenge. As in the song, Frankie & Johnnie,” he wanted to kill someone “who done him wrong.”

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Does anybody know?

Caught Justice Breyer on C-Span the other night speaking about his rationales for deciding certain cases that came before him on the Supreme Court.

This earnest but typically fuzzy-headed liberal spent some time justifying the Court’s consideration of foreign law to judge cases before our American court, most recently invoked in the Court’s decision to forbid executing teenagers. He wants to bring us in line with legal positions taken by foreign courts and judges, kind of, like, you know, getting us to go with the worldly flow.

Were I a lawyer, I’d rise to object on the basis of the Constitution. What if the worldly flow has no foundation in our Constitution? While I am personally squeamish about executing teenagers for their murderous crimes, the only justification I can find prohibiting it in American law is, well, my squeamishness.

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No, not Flushing, New York, the city in Queens where my beloved New York Mets play in their antiquated stadium. I’m talking about flushing, the verb.

It’s my proposal for a constitutional amendment mandating a total flushing from the Washington beltway all politicians, lobbyists, journalists and correspondents every sixteen years — the Flushteenth Amendment.

Just get rid of them all. Pull the chain and suck every one of the worthless polluters down and out the beltway drain. We then start fresh with a clean bowl of eager congressmen, senators and the assorted cronies-in-waiting that gravitate towards all ower bases. When the area becomes dirty with their eventual wicked waste matter, flush them out again. Remove the safety net of incumbency.

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The recent Gay and Lesbian Film Festival has generated a number of letters and articles from those who believe that homosexuality is immoral and others who challenge that belief.

Morality, I believe, is a fruitless avenue of debate on the issue because it implies that gays have chosen their particular “lifestyle.” More and more, scientific evidence is suggesting that homosexuality is genetic, which corroborates my own observations as a performer for fifteen years in musical theater in New York, an end point for many gays.

My (first) wife and I numbered many gay men as dear friends. We lived, worked and partied with them. Our bond was our talent and love of performing. No open-minded person could come away from these associations and declare that their homosexuality was a “lifestyle.” No, it was their essence. It seemed hard-wired into their systems.

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Will Maintain Busy Schedule, Nevertheless.

The Opera World was stunned today to learn of the untimely death at 86 of the ubiquitous, renowned tenor, Placido Domingo, who suffered a fatal heart attack as he was signing contracts for appearances in the Republic of Chad while simultaneously conducting Cavalleria Rusticana and singing Pagliacci in Buenos Aires.

However, fans of the peripatetic and seemingly indestructable tenor will be happy to learn that despite his death, Mr. Domingo will fulfill all his contractual obligations, which extend until age 94, had he lived that long. The first on his dead to-do list is a complete recording of Tristan und Isolde, which he’ll channel from the hereafter. Isolde and other characters will be singing live so it will be a kind of Natalie Cole sings with dead dad Nat kind of thing.

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